All of this was originally forked from and later inspired by holman's dotfiles. While the original Ruby dependencies have been removed the main strategy of using "topic" folders is still here which, imo, is the best part.
Dotfiles are essentially what makes your environment yours. All your unique little tweaks and settings that make your computer completely unusable and foreign to others. I had originally kept all my dotfiles in Dropbox which worked really nicely for a long time. Two big issues I had with my Dropbox setup is that 1) I would manually have to symlink new files/folders and 2) I couldn't use them on remote development machines (where I often work).
Also, to steal directly from holman:
I was a little tired of having long alias files and everything strewn about (which is extremely common on other dotfiles projects, too). That led to this project being much more topic-centric. I realized I could split a lot of things up into the main areas I used (Ruby, git, system libraries, and so on), so I structured the project accordingly.
If you're interested in the philosophy behind why projects like these are awesome, you might want to read my post on the subject.
git clone [email protected]:jgillman/dotfiles.git ~/.dotfilescd ~/.dotfiles./dotfiles.sh install
The install task will symlink the appropriate files in .dotfiles to your home
directory. Everything is configured and tweaked within ~/.dotfiles, though.
Everything's built around topic areas. If you're adding a new area to your
dotfiles — say, "Java" — you can simply add a java directory and put files in
there. Anything with an extension of .bash, .zsh, or .fish will get
automatically included into that respective shell. Anything with an extension
of .symlink will get symlinked without extension into $HOME. Files that
need custom linking (for example, into ~/.config/) can be handled through
link.sh files within each topic.
There's a few special files in the hierarchy.
- bin/: Anything in
bin/will get added to your$PATHand be made available everywhere. - topic/*.zsh: Any files ending in
.zshget loaded into your environment. - topic/*.symlink: Any files ending in
*.symlinkget symlinked into your$HOME. This is so you can keep all of those versioned in your dotfiles but still keep those autoloaded files in your home directory. These get symlinked in when you runrake install. - topic/*.completion.sh: Any files ending in
completion.shget loaded last so that they get loaded after we set up zsh autocomplete functions.